Tennyson's Suppressed Poems
"WHY do they treasure the rubbish I shot from my full-finish'd cantos?" Tennyson has querulously asked. To this the bibliographer replies that it is not permitted to genius to write rubbish; that for such as Tennyson the law is inexorable: what is written is written. A number of poems contributed from time to time to annuals and periodicals have never been reprinted and are in great part unknown even to professed students of Tennyson. Some of these I purpose considering in the present article. The volume of Poems by Two Brothers, including the prize poem "Timbuctoo," has been recently edited by Hallam Lord Tennyson. The poems suppressed from the 1830 and 1833 volumes have been included in a variorum edition of Tennyson's Earlier Poems edited by Mr. Churton Collins. But the poet's equally important contributions to periodicals have been hitherto entirely neglected.
"We may rank Tennyson," says Sir Alfred Lyall, "among the very few poets whose reputation would rather gain than suffer by the posthumous appearance of pieces that the author had deliberately withheld or withdrawn." How far this opinion will satisfy those whose sympathies are with Tennyson in his sonnet "Poets and their Bibliographers" I cannot say, but it will suffice for all others anxious to solve a question the poet himself did much to magnify. For assuredly Tennyson cannot permanently escape the fate inevitable to every front-rank writer. Lamb, Dickens, Byron, Fitzgerald—to name only the more obvious,—have already incurred the consequence of greatness in the publication of the unconsidered trifles of their youth. Beyond a sentimental regard for the poet's whimsicalities, Tennyson idealists advance no reason for the exceptional treatment they claim for him.
Even the casual student soon discovers that Tennyson's system of unceasing embellishment has considerably changed from their form as first published nearly all the earlier poems now included in the collected Works or reprinted in the Life, so that we cannot without hesitation accept them as trustworthy guides in the study of the poet's development. Rather they must be considered, not as what Holmes calls the fruit of his uncombed literary boyhood, but as work approved by the critical judgment of the poet's mature years. For those students, therefore, whose interest in Tennyson as the poet of the Victorian era rises superior to the consideration of his personal idiosyncrasies, there is no other course but to revert to Tennyson's poems as originally written or published, all the poet's efforts to the contrary notwithstanding.
Though the 1830 volume fell almost flat—the profit of publication was only £11,—Tennyson acquired by it a substantial measure of reputation. The literary fashion of the day took the form of the long-defunct Annuals. Readers will remember the pride of Arthur Pendennis at his début in such another as The Gem, to which Tennyson in 1831 contributed three poems—"Anacreontics," "A Fragment," and "No More," never since republished. Of the first little can be said, except that it was written by Tennyson:
With roses muskybreathed,
And drooping daffodilly,
And silverleaved lily,
And ivy darkly-wreathed,
I wove a crown before her,
For her I love so dearly,
A garland for Lenova.
With a silken cord I bound it.
Lenora, laughing clearly
A light and thrilling laughter.
About her forehead wound it,
And loved me ever after.
"No More," written by the poet at seventeen, is of a distinctly higher level:
